What do girl-friendly skateboarding, making shoes out of a sweatshirt, and building a website have in common? They're all examples of classes that are offered by the Rock Paper Scissors Collective -- a volunteer-run organization based in Oakland, California dedicated to promoting creativity and collaboration in the community. Continuing our series on non-profits, we chatted with Mark Nicola, Volunteer Coordinator, about the organization and the work (and art) that they do for their local area.

Now in its fourth year of operation, the RPS Collective achieves their mission by providing classes, youth outreach programs, an art studio, a retail store, and exhibition space for the community to come together through art, crafts, and performance. High school students can take advantage of an internship program to explore their interest in art, fashion and entrepreneurship, while artists can apply to have their work displayed in the gallery or sold in the Collective's store. RPS Collective's popular art and crafts classes are open to the public, and over 50% of classes are either free or donation-based.

The RPS Collective started using Google Docs over two years ago to streamline their processes, and--true to their mission--to promote collaboration. Mark echoed the challenges faced by many non-profit organizations, "We have lots of meetings, but being volunteer-run, having lots of meetings is just really tough. We realized that we should be collaborating more online. And Google Docs is a really good way for us to do this." Today, Mark and his teammates use Google Docs to write grant proposals collaboratively, circulate how-to guides, and manage volunteers' schedules.

Volunteers help with everything from operating the retail store, staffing gallery events, to teaching classes. For more information on volunteering at the RPS Collective, visit their website at www.rpscollective.com.

We continue our non-profit series in the state of Connecticut, where the temperatures today are below freezing and there's a good chance of snow tomorrow. The cold weather didn't stop Michael Sperber, Chair of Connecticut FIRST, from contacting us to tell us about how his organization uses Docs for event management, alumni outreach, and event surveys.

Connecticut FIRST is the Connecticut arm of FIRST, a not-for-profit organization that organizes robotics programs and competitions for young people ages 6 through 18. Young people are exposed to math, science, and engineering as they build their robots. Working in teams of at least 25 and guided by adult mentors, participants develop life skills such as teamwork and leadership.

The Connecticut organization has 33 FIRST Robotics Competition program teams consisting of over 1,000 high school students. Students are now busy building robots to compete in Lunacy, a competition where robots will have to navigate a low friction surface that simulates driving on the surface of the moon. Cool!

Michael has been involved in FIRST for over 12 years and uses Google Docs (as part of Google Apps) with over 10 others on the leadership team. Here are some things they're doing:

For an upcoming event, the leadership team has shared a spreadsheet to track invitation lists for VIPs. Michael told me, "Instead of sending attachments, it's much easier to do this online collaboratively."

They've recently discovered Forms and in the near future will be creating surveys to collect information from alumni to help build their alumni network.

As we count down to Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service on Monday, January 19th, we'll be featuring a few non-profit organizations that have found some creative ways to use Google Docs. These organizations are all dedicated to serving their communities and championing their causes, and like most non-profits, require the support of volunteers to keep their operations running. We hope that this series of posts will encourage you to dedicate next Monday's holiday to community service, and that you will find some worthy causes to support year-round, if you haven't already.

We've asked the featured organizations to share some of their Google Docs as templates so that others can use them as well. Look for a collection of these templates in a future post.

To kick things off, we thought we'd start with an organization close to home here in Silicon Valley. West Valley Community Services is based in Cupertino, California, and has been providing food, shelter and family-resources support to low-income families in the West Valley region of Santa Clara county for the last 35 years. They have more than 200 weekly volunteers and 24 staff members who have been using Docs since last February.

In addition to using Docs to manage contact lists and policy documents, Vicki Yang, Director of Operations told us, "We basically use Google Docs for anything that requires more than one person to look at or work on," which can include everything from donation tracking in a spreadsheet, to planning staff potlucks. The organization also uses forms linked from their website to manage external sign-ups for their weekly parent workshops and other community events.

To learn more about West Valley Community Services, or to find out how you can volunteer or support them, visit www.wvcommunityservices.org.

If your non-profit organization uses Google Docs and you'd like to share your story with us, please fill out this form. We look forward to hearing from you!

Would you like to help spread the word about the importance of community service and supporting your cause? Monday, January 19th is also known as the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service, and to honor this important day, the Google Docs team would like to spotlight not-for-profit organizations who make a difference in their communities.

We are looking for organizations that use Google Docs in some shape or form -- whether it's managing volunteer lists, sharing phone trees, writing grant applications collaboratively or more. If you are willing to share your story about how your organization uses Google Docs, and be featured on this blog, we'd like to hear from you.

For more information or to sign-up, please fill out this form. We look forward to hearing about all about how you use Google Docs in your organization!